-------- Original Message --------
Mike M writes:
Does anyone know who Paul H. Jr might be? Is there any connection
between him and Paul Hentzner? Here are CK's comments:
"Lines 376-377: was said in English Litt to be
This is replaced in the draft by the more significant - and more
tuneful - variant:
the Head of our Department deemed
***
Although it may be taken to refer to the man (whoever he was) who
occupied this post at the time Hazel Shade was a student, the reader
cannot be blamed for applying it to Paul H., Jr., the fine
administrator and inept scholar who since 1957 headed the English
Department of Wordsmith College. We met now and then (see Foreword and
note to line 894) but not often. The Head of the Department to which I
belonged was Prof. Nattochdag - "Netochka" as we called the dear man.
Certainly the migraines that have lately tormented me to such a degree
that I once had to leave in the midst of a concert at which I happened
to be sitting beside Paul H., Jr., should not have been a stranger's
business."
The migraines (plural) are reminiscent of Macbeth -- like Charles K, a
man with delusions of majesty -- when he's under great stress at the
banquet:
"Then comes my fit again" (III, iv, 20).
Charles is at a concert and has to leave, Lady Macbeth takes her
husband aside from the banquet at which the ghost of Banquo appears.
Charles' parenthetical note states: "(see Foreword and note to line
894)". A 1950 book called "The Royal Play of Macbeth" claims that the
play was written in haste by Shakespeare for the visit of James I's
brother-in-law, the King of Denmark, in 1606, in order to flatter the
king of England. An essay by historian Michael Hastings in a book
called "Focus on Macbeth" tears the argument to ribbons, since (amongst
other reasons) Scotland is treated in the play as barbaric. "The Royal
Play of Macbeth" was written by Henry N. Paul, who could be Paul H. Jr,
the inept scholar, seated next to Charles at the concert. Paul, as was
pointed out in a review of his book in the R.E.S., was an amateur
scholar, being a lawyer by profession, and his shortcomings were
highlighted in the review. So he might well have been the "fine
administrator and inept scholar". Fast forward to the note to line 894:
"... and two local characters, one being the slapdash disheveled hag
who ladles out the mash in the Levin Hall cafeteria."
"The third in the witch row," I precised quaintly, and everybody
laughed."
"... disheveled hag .... third ... witch" = Macbeth's three witches,
also called "midnight hags" (IV, i, 48). A bit later in the note, Shade
asks Charles if the name 'kinbote' doesn't mean "regicide" in his
language -- yet another Macbeth theme. In which case, Charles is
nominally a regicide, i.e. Macbeth himself, the king with the migraine,
the regicide with King Duncan as his victim. Whom does Charles wish to
dethrone? Shade? As Charles himself writes elsewhere, "The one who
kills is always his victim's inferior."
Now to the Foreword, the second alleged reference to Paul H. Jr. Given
that Paul H. Jr is an inept scholar, by a process of elimination he
appears to be the the "Prof. H", whose potential collaboration with
"Prof. C." Charles views with skepticism as co-editors of Shade's
manuscript. I pointed out in an earlier post that these "professors"
allude to Heminges & Condell, the alleged 'editors' of
Shakespeare's First Folio, who as minimally educated actors would have
been unqualified for that task. So there does seem to be a continuing
Shakespeare thread in play. Does Macbeth figure specifically, though?
Taking up the note to lines 376-77 which were quoted at the start, we
read:
"They apparently were, very much so. He kept his eye on me, and
immediately upon John Shade's demise circulated a mimeographed letter
that began:
Several members of the Department of English are painfully concerned
over the fate of a manuscript poem, or parts of a manuscript poem, left
by the late John Shade. The manuscript fell into the hands of a person
who not only is unqualified for the job of editing it, belonging as he
does to another department, but is known to have a deranged mind. One
wonders whether some legal action, etc."
So yet again the editorial work associated with a possibly incomplete
manuscript enters the frame. It is admitted by all that Macbeth as we
have it is mutilated, and has been completed by a hand other than
Shakespeare's -- Middleton is the candidate du jour. Of course any
number of Shakespeare plays were not entirely his own work, so the
direct allusion to Macbeth is weakened, though not to Shakespeare.
What about Paul Hentzner, who knew "the names of things"? There was a
real Paul Hentzner, tutor to a German nobleman, who visited England in
1598, right in the middle of the Shakespeare period, and wrote quite
extensively about the trip. He commented about London theater, among
other things, including a place of entertainment thought by some to be
the Globe theater. In the long note to line 894, CK mentions a
"visiting German lecturer from Oxford", so that could relate,
tangentially, to Hentzner. Later in the note the German drifts back in:
""Strange, strange," said the German visitor, who by some quirk of
alderwood ancestry had been alone to catch the eerie note that had
throbbed by and was gone."
Alder wood is associated with witchcraft; "ancestry" implies that his
forebears were witches -- yet a further connection to Macbeth, as is
the "eerie note". Migraine is again referenced through "throbbed".
The note continues:
"Shade [smiling and massaging my knee]: "Kings do not die - they only
disappear, eh, Charles?"
"Who said that?" asked sharply, as if coming out of a trance, the
ignorant, and always suspicious, Head of the English Department. "
The trance reminds one of Lady Macbeth, who in Act V, scene i, appears
in a trance, carrying a candle. Suspicion is a sub-theme in Macbeth.
These words are presumably spoken by Paul H Jr.
So much for Shakespeare. Returning to Paul Hentzner; could Paul H Jr be
his son? Kinbote tells us that Paul (senior?) "pleased John Shade much
better than the suburban refinements of the English Department." --
perhaps the kind of place where his son worked? The chronology is
deficient given that Hentzner's wife left him in 1950 with his son,
presumably a child. 1950 seems to be a significant date in Pale Fire.
The original Paul Hentzner perhaps visited the Globe Theatre in 1598; a
London theatre, at any rate. In Pale Fire he had a barn. Hazel "spent
three nights / Investigating certain sounds and lights / In an old
barn". Perhaps barn is a metaphor for theater. In 1576 James Burbage,
father of the famous Shakespearean actor Richard Burbage leased some
buildings remaining after the destruction of Holywell Priory, including
one called the Great Barn, and this spot was the venue of the first
fixed Elizabethan theatre, in Shoreditch, called simply The Theatre. It
was later demolished and its material used to construct the Globe. In
1956 Hazel busied herself with the barn, and the note to line 347 ("old
barn") supplies two versions of events. One was that the disturbance
might have emanated from "an outraged ghost or a rejected swain" --
both theatrical clichés, swain having a period ring to it. The second
version emerges from Jane P, as a proxy for what would have been
Shade's own re!
port, had Charles not preempted him: ".. made me regret that I
prevented him from getting to the point he was confusedly and
self-consciously making (for as I have said in an earlier note, he
never cared to refer to his dead child) by filling in a welcome pause
with an extraordinary episode from the history of Onhava University.
That episode took place in the year of grace 1876. But to return to
Hazel Shade...". That episode is never referred to again. Between 1876
and 1576 is a gap of 300 years, which seems to be significant both here
and in Ada (that will have to wait). For example, Hentzner was "a
throwback to the "curious Germans" who three centuries ago had been the
fathers of the first great naturalists." Jane P's version incorporated
"theatrical ululations and flashes". Hazel's second visit followed her
failure to be accompanied by two brothers: "She tells me she suggested
that the White twins (nice fraternity boys accepted by the Shades)
would come instead." If this!
passage is indeed redolent of Shakespeare, the Whites would be the
brothers Francis and Anthony Bacon (white because the Bacon family
lived in St. Albans). Later, Hazel "wanted her parents to witness the
"talking light" with her"; the light didn't show up, but Charles
notifies us that it did reappear, transformed, in the poem containing
the lines "And maybe Shakespeare floods a whole / Town with innumerable
lights".
.